By The Straits Times | Created at 2026-07-28 10:51:46 | Updated at 2026-07-28 12:46:51
2 hours ago
Bengaluru - How much did the Indian Prime Minister spend on foreign trips? How many children rescued from trafficking were rehabilitated? How many sexual assaults led to convictions? When were tenders issued for a ministry digitisation project?
These were the eclectic range of questions Indians from across the country asked the federal government in 2025, using the country’s transparency and accountability law.
The Right To Information (RTI) Act, passed in 2005, gives Indians the right to ask for data or information from authorities in public interest, barring rare exemptions. Public information officers (PIOs) appointed in every department are responsible for responding to queries within 30 days, failing which they will be penalised at the rate of 250 rupees (S$3.40) for each day of delay.
The Central Information Commission’s (CIC) Annual Report 2025 published in February 2026 showed a record rise in the number of RTI applications, with a 30 per cent growth in the financial year 2024-2025 since the Covid-19 pandemic. This demonstrates an abiding interest among Indians to hold authorities to account as well as the increasing ease of filing applications digitally.
Five ministries – Corporate Affairs, Finance, Railways, Education and Defence – comprised a quarter of the 2,303 public authorities but received over half the total number of all RTI applications filed in 2024-2025. The Ministry of Corporate Affairs led with approximately 254,000 requests, followed by the Ministry of Finance with around 220,000 applications.
The Ministry of Corporate Affairs reduced its massive backlog by about 87 per cent from the previous year to only 1,619 in 2024-2025. It only rejected 306 RTIs.
Kansara Gopal, a steel shop owner from Rajsamand in Rajasthan, has filed applications since the RTI was passed, inspired by the grassroots movement for the law launched only 15km from his hometown. The campaign for government transparency in the nineties was led primarily by daily wage labourers and farmers in Rajasthan before it turned into a nationwide movement that included lawyers, activists and other professionals who helped draft what’s often called the people’s law.
Gopal has requested information about 50 times on various issues, like whether the police protocol was followed to remove street vendors and the justifications provided for an internet shutdown in Delhi during the Gen Z protest in July.
“I deploy the information from each to reveal corruption or the absence of due process. RTI is a great way to pressure the government to get work done. Information received through RTI is also effective in courts, and it bolsters petitions we file,” Gopal told The Straits Times.
He has filed a petition about bringing private colleges under the purview of the RTI Act and numerous appeals with the CIC against denial of information by various public authorities.
Over the past decade, both the quality and frequency of responses from the government has dwindled, according to data and the experience of RTI activists.
An analysis of the CIC report by the Delhi-based Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI) found that backlogs are rising, response rates are falling, and constitutional bodies are reporting inaccurate data. The authorities responded to 4 per cent fewer RTIs than the previous year, and around 58,000 requests, accounting for about 3 per cent of applications, were rejected.
The RTI law has ten exemption clauses to deny information, like for national security reasons. The ministry of finance, home affairs and defence rejected the most number of requests. But the CHRI analysis revealed that in almost four of every ten rejections, the reasons for denial were not specified.
A frequent excuse for withholding information is that the information asked for was deemed personal, not public, said Pankti Jog, 50, who runs a helpline for people filing RTI applications to government bodies in Ahmedabad, Gujarat.
She cited the case of Ramanbhai Parmar from Adas village in Anand district of Gujarat, who had filed an RTI in May 2025 asking for a copy of the minutes of a village council meeting. This meeting had granted permission to a corporation to build commercial warehouses on community land. However, the Gujarat Information Commission denied him the public records, reasoning that the meeting minutes would have signatures of the village leaders, which was personal information that could be misused to commit financial fraud.
“How is a commercial company’s registration personal information? How is the attendance register of a village meeting confidential?” asked Jog.
Former state information commissioner of Madhya Pradesh Rahul Singh wrote to the Gujarat Information Commission on June 29, 2026, that this denial was “not legally sustainable” and that restricting access to public records of the village council weakened accountability at the grassroots level. The Commission did not change its stance.
“These are frustrating excuses misused to hide wrongdoing and corruption. Denial should be the exception, but these days, denial is the norm and getting information is the exception,” Jog said.
Transparency activists told ST that the 2023 Digital Personal Data Protection Act has been counterproductive to the RTI Act as it allows officials to deny access to “personal information” without having to prove that privacy harm outweighs the public interest.
In Jharkhand state, child rights activist Baidnath Kumar, 50, added that officials had found new delay tactics to discourage information seekers. In 2025, when he asked for statewide data on the total number of police complaints filed on child trafficking and the number of rescue operations conducted, his query was transferred to hundreds of police stations across the state.
“I have been getting bits of replies from 480 police stations over the past two years, when the state’s police chief could easily give me the consolidated data instead. It is an attempt to tire me out. They misuse bureaucracy to discourage citizens from demanding information,” said Kumar, who is patiently waiting to collect the data before he demands better protection of trafficked children.
Even more starkly, the CHRI analysis revealed that of the total penalty of 156,000 rupees that was imposed on officials for failing to provide information, only 453 rupees was collected – a sign that ad hoc amounts were being charged and errant officials were being let off easily.
“Even more bewildering are the claims” of tiny penalty amounts collected from several ministries, like two rupees from officials at the Ministry of External Affairs, and one rupee from the department of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises. These figures are much lower than the minimum penalty of 250 rupees that can be imposed under the RTI Act, the CHRI report noted.
Despite delays in receiving information, the filing of applications under the RTI Act has steadily risen over the years.
Mansoor Umer Darvesh, a stationery shopkeeper in Mumbai, has filed at least 200 RTI applications.
Many of the 66-year-old’s RTIs have had immediate impact, such as one asking about the money spent on street lights that made the municipality install the lights overnight, and one about the expenses of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s foreign trips that resulted in the expenses being made public and onto make the news. Another about progress of Bollywood actor Salman Khan’s 2002 hit-and-run case in which a homeless man was killed, exposed that crucial case files had been inexplicably destroyed.
He told ST that for an ordinary citizen, “even as the RTI replies are getting shorter and less thorough, it remains an opportunity to turn the tables of power, to scare corrupt officials and remind authorities that the people are watching them.”
